Reading Recommendations from Radcliffe’s Fellows and the Editor

Reading Recommendations from Radcliffe’s Fellows and SeniorWomen's Editor

Julie Guthman
University of California, Santa Cruz
Geography

Julie, this year's Frances B. Cashin Fellow, recommends The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California Press, 2015), by the anthropologist Jason De León. De León's book combines gripping storytelling with ethnographic, archaeological, and forensic research to illuminate United States immigration policy with regard to Mexico and the impacts of this policy on undocumented migrants.

Françoise Hamlin
Brown University
History

Françoise, this year's ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow, recommends Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010), by the former United States poet laureate Natasha Trethewey BI ’00. Trethewey's book is a personal account of the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that, says Françoise, "wrenches at the heart." She adds that the writer "pulls you into her past, through the ravages and politics of Hurricane Katrina, and poses questions about the nation's future when morality seems to be at its all-time low."

Lisa Haushofer
Harvard University
History

Lisa, a Radcliffe Institute Graduate Student Fellow, was hooked (and surprised) by James Rebanks’s The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Penguin, 2016). She notes, "It's a story about deep-rootedness in a place and a life shaped by hundreds of years of tradition. I had no idea that the ins and outs of sheep farming could be such a riveting read."

David Hibbett
Clark University
Biology and Medical Sciences

David, this year’s Grass Fellow, enjoyed reading Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (Knopf, 2015), about the 19th-century naturalist, explorer, and geographer who influenced thinkers ranging from Thoreau to Darwin. According to David, "the text is scholarly yet accessible and richly contextualized."

Alexandra Killewald
Harvard University
Sociology

Alexandra, this year’s Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow, recommends Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Broadway Books, 2013). This journalistic account of a medical center in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina offers a searing view into the many challenges hospitals face in the wake of natural disasters. Alexandra also recommends Siri Hustvedt"s The Blazing World (Simon & Schuster, 2014), which she calls "the novel for every woman who's wondered if her ideas would be taken more seriously if she were a man and for the men who wonder what that would feel like."

Sharon Marcus
Columbia University
Cultural Studies

Sharon, this year's Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow, recommends Foal’s Bread (Allen & Unwin, 2011), by the late Australian novelist and short-story writer Gillian Mears. Sharon calls Foal's Bread "one of the most beautiful and moving novels I've read in recent years" and reports that "Mears writes stunningly, bringing to life the intricate sport of horse jumping and the idiosyncratic beauties of the New South Wales landscape."

Camilo Mendez
Independent Composer (United Kingdom)
Music Composition

Camilo, this year's Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music, recommends The Melancholy of Resistance (Tuskar Rock Press, 2016), a novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, which follows a mysterious circus in a small town and features unforgettable characters. Camilo also recommends The Literary Conference (Hamish Hamilton, 2013), a surreal, self-reflexive novella by the Argentine author César Aira, whom Camilo calls "one my favorite South American writers."

Martha Minow
Harvard Law School
Law

Martha recommends The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap(Knopf, 2017), by the former Radcliffe fellow Gish Jen ’77, BI ’87, RI ’02. Martha calls Jen’s study “such an engaging and gorgeously written exploration of psychological and cultural differences.” She also recommends All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt (Simon & Schuster, 2013), by John Taliaferro. This biography charts the life of an American statesman whose career spanned more than four decades.

Nicola Pohl
Indiana University
Chemistry

Nicola, this year’s Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow, named the following books as the highlights of her recent reading: In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), a novel by Zia Haider Rahman, the 2017–2018 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Radcliffe; Mass: The Quest to Understand Matter from Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields(Oxford University Press, 2017), by Jim Baggott; and The Bostonians (Macmillan and Co., 1886), by Henry James. Of this last book, Nicola says, “Every time I am impatient with the pace of change, I remind myself of history and the complexities of my fellow humans.”

Jana Prikryl
New York Review of Books
Poetry

Jana’s current bedtime reading is Henry Green’s novel Caught (Viking Press, 1952), which follows a well-off Londoner serving in the Auxiliary Fire Service during World War II. Jana praises Green’s language, which she describes as “spare as twigs.” She adds, “It's a novel so dry and fastidious in representing people living through difficult times that it manages to communicate this with startling emotional force.”

Phillip Warnell
Kingston University London (United Kingdom)
Film and Video

Phillip, this year’s Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, loved Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Animal Side (Fordham University Press, 2011), a philosophical argument for the importance of other species in shaping human thought. Phillip describes Bailly’s book as “a beautifully written, poetic exposition of animality.”

Janina Wellmann
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Germany)
History

Coming from Germany to Cambridge, Janina, this year’s Maury Green Fellow, brought with her Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (D. Appleton & Company, 1920). Janina enjoyed the “subtle language and irony” running through Wharton’s classic portrait of Gilded Age New York City.

Editor's Note: I finished Bobby Kennedy, A Raging Spirit (after having read the requisite Fire and Fury) and just received Rise and *Kill First; the Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations but my stack of bedside books include Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a return to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Sam Willis' The Fighting Temeraire and Alan Riding's And the Show Went On; Cultural Life In Nazi-Occupied Paris. Of course, there's the third volume of Robert A. Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography still to finish, Master of the Senate, but interrupted by H.R. Halderman's The Halderman Diaries, recommended by Jeffrey Toobin as the 'best book on impeachment.'

*I worked on a number of Time stories regarding Israel and its hunt for the Black September Movement members who murdered a number of 1972 Olympic athletes in Munich, and so became interested in this subject.

Oh, and I forgot my daughter's gift of The RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg's) Workout by Bryant Johnston which I'm now dedicated to; but I can't locate my copy of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (lent to a granddaughter perhaps?)

Pages: 1 · 2

Culture and Arts, Home and Shopping, News and Issues, Literature and Poetry, History, Culture Watch, Shop for Yourself, Current Reading, Politics, Senior Women Web, Articles, Sightings, Book Reviews, Tam Gray, Authors, What's New Add comments

Reading Recommendations from Radcliffe’s Fellows and SeniorWomen's Editor

More Articles